Though The Witcher 4’s tech demo at the recent State of Unreal didn’t reflect the actual state of gameplay, it still drew attention for all the right reasons. Running at 60 frames per second with ray tracing on a base PS5 is ambitious, but it also represents a shift for the studio always demoing its titles on PC.
Speaking to Digital Foundry, Charles Tremblay, CD Projekt RED’s VP of technology, explained that the studio encountered various problems in the past when developing for PC and then scaling down. This was most evident with Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4 and Xbox One. “This time around, we really want to be more of a console-first development. Then, we worked with Unreal and saw the challenge. To realize the ambition to make what we want – 60 FPS on PS5 – there would be work.
“And this is why we started to talk to figure out what needs to be done with the technology. We also decided we need to have all those things that need to be developed. Where we go from there, it’s hard to say, but right now, we really want to focus on what it means to make this ambition on a console, and we have the project at 60 FPS. We really wanted to also aim for 60 FPS once again and not go back to 30 FPS or something like that.”
Such a task will be challenging on the Xbox Series S, which isn’t as powerful as either the Series X or PS5. Tremblay responded that it’s “next on our radar,” but that 60 FPS would be “extremely challenging” on Series S. “Let’s just say that this is something that we need to figure out.”
CD Projekt RED hasn’t confirmed the platforms for The Witcher 4. Even the release window remains unknown due to the early stage of development, but it won’t launch in 2026. On the bright side, you won’t have to worry about fetch quests, similar to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Stay tuned for more updates in the meantime.
